For this generation of men, the normal depression provoked by a confrontation with mortality is compounded by another disturbing fact: Their peers are dropping all around them. No wonder a man approaching middle age experiences a poignant new sense of physical vulnerability: The American male knows damned well that he is likely to die prematurely—earlier than the American female, certainly, and earlier than men in many other countries.
Today the average life expectancy for the white American male is 68.9 years, whereas for the female it is 76.7 years— nearly 8 years longer. And the United States now ranks only twenty-fourth in the world in life expectancy for men, compared to ninth for women.
Such statistics don’t surprise us. That women outlive men in this country is a fact most of us now take for granted. We know, for example, that the male is considered the weaker sex biologically. Studies show that although many more males are conceived, they are more fragile than females before and directly after birth. (About 12 per cent more male than female fetuses die before delivery, and during the first week of life the death rate for males is 32 per cent greater than for females.)
We also know that the male’s greater susceptibility to trauma and illness continues later in life. Key indexes reveal that heart disease strikes twice as many men as women; that three men die of cancer for every two women; that four times more men than women die of respiratory diseases, and twice as many of cirrhosis of the liver. In addition, men are three times more vulnerable to death from accidents, suicides, and murder.
To explain this disparity between the sexes, some authorities note that men are historically more prone to violent behavior than women, more likely to be killed during wartime. Others point out that excessive male mortality is common to many species—and thus a “law of nature.” They therefore blame biology as the primary, if not the only, cause for the American male’s dying younger than the female.
Such explanations will not do, however. They ignore the fact that this gap in the life span between American men and women is only a recent phenomenon. At the turn of the century, when infectious diseases were more common causes of childhood fatalities, the average life expectancy was only fifty—but it was the same for both sexes. And among people over sixty-five the male was dominant: There were one hundred older men for every ninety-eight women.
Now, however, women outnumber men in this country at every age level over twenty, despite the fact that more boys are born than girls. There are now one hundred women to every ninety-five men in the population at large; and among people over sixty-five, there are one hundred women to every seventy-two men.
The alarming fact is that this gap is continuing to widen: By 1990 it is expected that there will be only sixty-seven men over sixty-five for every one hundred women.
Thus there has been a steady reversal in the life expectancy
trends for men, as compared to women. Further, this reversal
has been occuring in the United States—but not in other
countries.
If the life span of both sexes was the same at the turn of the century, why has the ratio of male to female deaths chanced? And why does the American male now die an average of eight years earlier than the female? These key questions cannot be answered by indicting the more fragile biology of the male unless we are prepared to argue that the fundamental biolocy of the sexes has chanced during this period, and that this chance has occurred only in the United Statf-s—a preposterous theory.
Clearly the untimely death of the American male must be the result of social factors, not natural ones. Just what are these factors?
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